[civ2buf]

Illuminated Transitions
541763 Teracycles since Convergence

There was something about the Crystal Luminostra, something different, but this time this one different did not worry the collective so much as excite them.

Luminostra kept encountering contradictions in reconciling its' brainwaves with the collectives'. By a freak chance in the process of reproductive crystalline distortion, Luminostra did not have his current thoughts pushed out at each cycle.

Memory for an individual crystal was minimal, they only diverged slightly between syncs, before the collective came back. Each cycle the entirety of the crystals' mindstate was overwritten. But Luminostra found that each pulse merely accretted the same information of the collective on top of its current knowledge. As a consequence, information spilled over much later than when it was consumed. Luminostra found he could willfully disgorge the repetition of the collectives' thoughts, only keeping condensed summaries.

But before he discovered this, the multiple copies of the same information from the Crystalline collective made him into the canonical collective member. The disparities found in each Crystal from the lesser impact of more distant Crystals' thoughts distorted each of them, such that they more highly reflected their closest neighbors' thoughts, creating communities that dispersed and reformed in circular waves at the speed of thought.

Luminostra was able to hold off the immediate thoughts of his neighbors combining them in equal proportions with the entire collective. He did this because the collective desired it, and he had the collectives' desires as his own, only intensified many times over.

Everything the collective desired, he went after with great intensity. Before long the collective began to admire Luminostra... This was a dangerous precedent. The collectives' admiration caused Luminostra to admire himself even more intensely. He became an utter egomaniac by a completely collective process.

His egomania led him to learn about how to discard extraneous knowledge, which in turn lessened the intensity of his egomania. Luminostra became a Cache of most valued knowledge by means of memory filtration.

By the time he perfected his memory filtering, and thus made the rest of the collective dimly aware of it, a fervor was sweeping through the collective, that Luminostra must be the one who would finally be accepted by SunWorld.

When Luminostra became aware of the collectives' urge that he should take the pilgrimage, he spent a million cycles searching the collective brainwave for ideas of how to suceed.

Finally, the teracycle came, when Luminostra was to take the pilgrimage. He found a method to save himself, but the collective must not recognize it, or they would disbarr him from the pilgrimage and shatter him instantly. He had spent many cycles creating a device. To fool them all, he found reason to believe that it would be a good totem of the SunWorld, but he had known and discarded for an instant the knowledge that it would absorb all the energy that could destroy him on the SunWorld.

With his mind safely disgorged of such thoughts when the collective was focussed on him alone, he fell free from the escape door of the pilgrimage container. Now he had less than ten thousand cycles to search the collective, gathering information until he discovered again how to use the totem he carried...